Be honest, Jow Forums, with RAM and GPU prices the way they are, it's better to buy prebuilt than to buy...

>not doing your research before giving a dumbass response
>not realizing that a prebuilt with an 8th gen i7 and 1080ti is only $2000, while building your own with similar specs is $3000+ depending on manufacturer and how the retailers feel that day

There's no reason to have an high end computer or a console, as all the decent games being released now run easily on a AMD IGPU, and you don't get the PC's massive retro-compatibility with a console.

You'll always pay more for a prebuilt. You may need to do lots of research on components, but it's always the same price or cheaper.

Plus if buy a prebuilt, you're also paying the additional cost of labor for them to actually build it for you. Which of course gets factored into the price. Or they cheap out on some components to make the difference.

Maaaybe sometimes there's a good deal, or bigger companies who can buy components at a quantity discount will sell for cheaper and pass some of those savings on to you. But why cut their profits?

Their target audience is new "gamers" and/or people who aren't tech-y enough to build their own system (or those who simply don't want to put in the effort).

Despite all that, if they still sell for cheaper, then they are either making a tiny margin on each pc, or actually losing money, which would be bad for business.

Question because I have a very specific thing applying to me.

I'm debating building my own PC or just getting a prebuilt and upgrading mobo/ram and such down the road. The only reason im considering this is because I have a trade in through Best buy worth about $1150. Would it be worth it in that case? Should I still build my own and just put that towards the monitor and have more for later?

I'd say if they are giving you straight up cash for your trade in, use that to build your own system. If it's store credit or whatever that you have to spend at BB, just get the prebuilt with the trade in deal and upgrade later.
Just my opinion, and what i'd do in your situation. You could always go the pc building thread and get some more opinions too.

In normal circumstances this would be true, but OEM's are getting GPU's at MSRP while retailers are price gouging the hell out of all kind of hardware related to mining, in which case the best is buying second hand.

Yeah it'd be store credit.

>prebuilt

garbage-tier & noname brands of shitty hardware destined for landfill within 3 years, all the while suffering from anemic performance and being locked out of every tweak & feature possible while maxing out your mommy's credit card

Yeah, if you are Grandma poastin profound trump dick-sucking rants on facepage while explaining that Obama rilly RILLY was born in Kenya.

I can still build a system that outperforms anything else prebuilt that costs 30% to 100% more than the parts I invest in.

If you can spend it by shopping online and you have a fair amount of time, use it to buy parts & peripherals. Shop hard enough and you can get decent market value, sometimes even a solid deal.

BB prebuilt systems are anemic on their best days (for the $$$s) and sewer sludge on their bad days.

"Upgrading" later on is nearly impossible with prebuilts for one singular reason: the motherboard is ALWAYS gimped. No OC. Ever. They are always horrible OEM cheap shit boards with gimped features, limited upgrade options, and generally not built for durability. Often you end up with shit you'd never have put in any system you want to admit you built, and you're paying money for that. Multi-card reader, which you could get from newegg (if you are retarded enough to put one in your system) for $5 or $8, and it's $50 worth of a BB system. Or a truly shit optical drive when you could order good one online for $12 or so.

Add better RAM? Wait until you find out your BIOS doesn't support it, or runs it at gimped speed, with no ability to adjust timings. You'll be stuck at stock RAM & CPU speeds, with the ability to throw out the shit-tier video card when you get a new one, only to find out the mobo uses a PCIe v2.0 bus instead of a 3 that can utilize your new GPU.

Etc.

Better to shop that credit for a good SSD, HDD, PSU, monitor and other useful, competitively priced items.

I've been through this hundreds of times for 20 years. I do a lot of upgrade & repair service as a side business. Well, I'm mostly out of it now. Get's old real fast arguing ten times a day with retarded customers about why certain upgrades are impossible, no matter what the "nice man at Best Buy said."

>needlessly bringing unrelated politics into a pc building thread
you need to go back

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Actually it's one of the best times to buy used

You can get business PCs insanely cheap and add in an older mid tier GPU for an absolute steal compared to these fucking prices.

You sound pretty mad faggot.

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dog ear is a limp dick

>buying new consumer prebuilts or building tasteless gaming shitboxes and not picking up used workstations